If you listened to the September 21 Select Board meeting or read many of the online comments, you will almost certainly hear a familiar defense: “Your smartphone already tracks everything you do, so why does it matter if a camera records your car?”
It is a clever soundbite designed to make mass surveillance feel ordinary, inevitable, and harmless. But comparing voluntary consumer technology to an involuntary, town-wide surveillance network is a false equivalency.
When you look at the legal thresholds, the question of consent, and how data is actually handled, the argument unravels.
1. Consent: Consumer Choice vs. Involuntary Dragnet
Using a smartphone involves agency. You choose which apps to install, which permissions to grant, and whether to turn off location services. If you want maximum privacy, you can switch off cellular data, leave the device behind, or use operating systems and local tools that keep GPS coordinates strictly on the physical device rather than streaming them to a corporate cloud.
You have no such choice with automated license plate cameras.
You cannot navigate daily life without using public roads to buy groceries, commute to work, or visit family. When a town installs ALPR cameras along its main corridors, participation is compulsory. Every vehicle passing the lens is logged, cataloged, and time-stamped—regardless of whether the driver has committed a crime or consented to being tracked.
2. The Legal Standard: The Constitution Protects Your Phone
The claim that “your phone is worse” ignores one of the most critical privacy rulings in modern American history.
In the landmark 2018 Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, the Court recognized that historical cell-site location information provides an intimate window into a person’s life. As a result, the Court established that law enforcement must generally obtain a search warrant based on probable cause before accessing that location data from telecom providers.
Flock’s infrastructure circumvents this core Fourth Amendment safeguard:
- Warrantless queries: Cameras track thousands of innocent motorists 24/7 without judicial warrants or individual suspicion.
- Retroactive movement tracking: Officers can type in a plate and reconstruct travel patterns across town—and across state lines—without demonstrating probable cause to a judge first.
Arguing that local government should adopt warrantless ALPR networks simply because smartphones exist ignores decades of hard-won constitutional protections.
3. Data Architecture: Fragmented Advertising vs. A National Police Dragnet
Commercial app developers collect data primarily for targeted advertising. While commercial data brokers certainly present privacy issues, that data is decentralized, fragmented across hundreds of vendors, and regulated by consumer privacy statutes. In another blog post I will show how to assess the security of your iPhone or Android, but please be aware that if you do not consent to the apps that you load, no app vendor is getting your information. Even a phone configured by an idiot does not represent the threat to our Privacy that Flock does.
Flock’s network is built for a completely different purpose: centralized, rapid law enforcement access.
When a town contracts with Flock, its cameras do not operate in a vacuum. Flock allows local police departments to share camera feeds across an expansive national network. A scan captured at a local intersection can be queried by out-of-state law enforcement agencies, regional fusion centers, and federal entities. Local taxpayers fund the hardware, but local town officials lose control over who queries their residents’ travel habits.
Real Public Safety Doesn’t Require Warrantless Surveillance
The “phone tracking” defense relies on resignation—the idea that because modern life involves technology, citizens should abandon expectations of privacy in public spaces.
True community safety relies on targeted, constitutional policing based on evidence and suspicion, not mass dragnet surveillance that treats every driver as a person of interest until proven otherwise.
Before committing local resources and public rights-of-way to private surveillance vendors, our community deserves policies rooted in transparency, local oversight, and respect for constitutional liberties.